Friday, November 29, 2013

In the Hippias Minor, Socrates challenges Hippias, a vain
sophist, over the matter of who is the better man: Achilles or Odysseus.
Hippias holds that Achilles was the truest, strongest and best of the Greeks,
while Odysseus was the wiliest – polytropos – or the falsest, the most cunning,
the most deceptive. But Socrates, surprisingly enough, comes up with an
argument to show that either both Achilles and Odysseus are mixtures of the
good and the false, or that – if Achilles lies and deceptions come about involuntarily,
whereas Odysseus voluntarily takes on the deceivers role, as Hippias maintains
– that Odysseus must be the better man. This is the end of the dialogue:

Socrates: Is not justice either a sort of power or knowledge, or
both ? Or must not justice inevitably be one or other of these ?

Hippias : Yes.

Socrates : Then injustice is a power of the soul, the more
powerful soul is the more just, is it not ? For we found, my friend, that
such a soul was better.

Hippias : Yes, we did.

Socrates : And what if it be knowledge ? Is not the wiser
soul more just, and the more ignorant more unjust ?

Hippias : Yes.

Socrates : And what if it be both ? Is not the soul which
has both, power and knowledge, more just, and the more ignorant more
unjust ? Is that not inevitably the case ?

Hippias : It appears to be.

Socrates : This more powerful and wiser soul, then, was found to
be better and to have more power to do both good and disgraceful acts in every
kind of action was it not ?

[376a]Hippias :
Yes.

Socrates : Whenever, then, it does disgraceful acts, it does
them voluntarily, by reason of power and art ; and these, either one or
both of them, are attributes of justice.

Hippias : So it seems.

Socrates : And doing injustice is doing evil acts, and not doing
injustice is doing good acts.

Hippias : Yes.

Socrates : Will not, then, the more powerful and better soul,
when it does injustice, do it voluntarily, and the bad soul
involuntarily ?

Hippias : Apparently.

[376b]Socrates :
Is not, then, a good man he who has a good soul, and a bad man he who has a bad
one ?

Hippias : Yes.

Socrates : It is, then, in the nature of the good man to do
injustice voluntarily, and of the bad man to do it involuntarily, that is, if
the good man has a good soul.

Hippias : But surely he has.

Socrates : Then he who voluntarily errs and does disgraceful and
unjust acts, Hippias, if there be such a man, would be no other than the good
man.”

Socrates pulls himself up short, here. How could he come to this
conclusion? It is as if the Socratic method had revealed its daemonic side
without, for once, the covering irony. But out of this little snatch of back
and forth, in a dialogue that never receives very much attention, we see the
outlines of the philosophe buffoon. The philospher buffoon stradles the line
between the serious and the ludicrous. For him, the norm is vitiated by the
normal, that dead even, never traveled thing – that opposite of polytropos, the
word, applied to Odysseus, that sets the dialogue into motion. To never test
one’s capacity for badness is not goodness, but sloth – the expression of the
soul in a bad state. This is the social via negativa. Neither the right nor the
left like it. School will not teach it. You have to learn it outside of school,
if you want to learn it at all. It is at the root of many liberation movements.
It clenched Frederick Douglass’ hand into a fist and made him beat his
overseer, which was done as much to honour the bad man as the good man in
Douglass’ soul – the whole man, not the candycane liberator, all fucking
sweetness and light. In Dana Spiotta’s excellent novel, Eat the Document, which
tracks a Weather style ‘terrorist’ named Caroline aka Mary up to the nineties
in tandem with a nineties, Northwestern anti-globalist anarchist,the anarchist actions are called ‘tests’.
Caroline, in 1972, has the underground mantra down: Count on bad luck. In 1998,
bad luck, for the children of America, is unimaginable.

Well, we are beginning to feel bad luck again, and perhaps on this
circuit of the dialectic of the enlightenment we are also coming back to the
anti-hero.

In the Tractate of Steppenwolf, that mysterious text
magically popping up in the novel, the writer analyzes Harry Haller’s error in
thinking that he is dividedbetween a
man and a wolf – for even the wolf has more than two souls. We are, instead,
knots of an indefinite number of selves, just like the Indian Gods in the
Vedas.

“He would like to overcome the wolf in himself and become
completely human, or renounce the human and at least live a unified, untorn
life as a wolf. It is possible that he had never really precisely observed a
wolf – because then he would have perhaps seen that even the animals have no
unified souls, that even with them, behind the beautiful, austere form of the
body lives a multitude of wants and circumstances, that even the wolf has its
abysses in itself, that even the wolf suffers.”

The Socrates of the Hippias Minor is closer to the
Antisthenes’ Socrates than to Plato’s, closer to the figure who inspired
cynicism than the figure who inspired Platonism. After all, the philosophical
lineage runs not just from Socrates to Plato to all the history of philosophy
that comes afterwards, but also from Socrates to Antisthenes to Diogenes up
through many notable anti-philosophical
philosophers, the parasites, Bruno’s ass, Rameau’s nephew, and so on – a bunch
of dangerous farceurs. But even the farceur suffers – although the true clown
finds the tears of the clown a little too close to kitsch not to laugh at,
afterwards.

Monday, November 25, 2013

Right after his daily bread, the human unit needs to feel
superior to his coevals. Or some subgroup thereof. Those who lose this feeling
are surely clinically depressed – such humility is pathological. Don’t look for
it from saints – when God is your personal confidante, your edge is 24 carat. You
can no more expect saints to be humble than you can expect the taste of a
banana from a rutabaga.

The age old tale of the human unit from the sticks who comes
to the big city falls, of course, under this generalization. Although from Balzac to Franzen it is
presented as a progress in civilization, the provincial from the provinces
inevitably provincializes his city, or part of it, and proceeds to shoot
spitball as the yokels from where he was at, or, in general, who are not
counted among the elite of his quartier.

This is one of the reasons I love the NYT Styles section. It
is hard wired to look down at the plebes, and it is written, surely, by former
country mice, who have now wiggled into what they consider the cool set – aka heaven
– and kick others who are striving towards that summit. Myself, like any other
human unit, I’m all impressed. Plus of course I share certain of the
prejudices.

This Sunday’s Styles section was particularly gratifying. As
is often the case, many articles are devoted to looking down upon Los Angeles.
When, in the old days – before we moved here in August – I read about L.A., I
was basically ignorant of the geography, except of course for the four million
hours of tv and film that I’d eyeballed, all set in LA. Now that I’ve gotten
here, I’ve decided my schtick will be anti-LA. I’ll compare it invidiously to
Paris. I’m confident the Styles staff would approve. Thus I could revel in the snobbism on display
in the story, “A Café where Los Angeles Goes to Wake Up.” The name of the sorry
bistro is the Griddle Café, and it is lost somewhere on Sunset Strip.
Apparently it is one of those breakfast joints thatevery American town boasts –
joints with the bottomless cup coffee and the diabetes inducing pancakes,
joints that smell of bacon. I’ve gone to these kind of places my whole life,
which definitely shows a masochistic streak, as the experience is always the
same. Once I’ve over-replenished myself, my inner teenage anorexic howls in my
bowels the rest of the day.

Anyway, there are some great shots in the article. The
pancakes of the Griddle are described in sickening detail, down to a truly
disgusting gumbo called Mounds of Pleasure, “a stack of chocolate and coconut
flapjacks buried in whipped cream, [which] should come with a straw.” Yum! Next
to licking the garbage disposal, I can
think of nothing that I would less like to put in my mouth. But the best shot is a quote from an
expatriated New Yorker which, I think, will be my, my poetic summing up of LA:

“Another magazine editor, Janice Min of the Hollywood
Reporter, offered this analysis, having moved to Los Angeles from Neew York
three years ago: “There is no discovery in LA because you’re always in a car heading for a specific
destination. And because of that, people become very attached to the same few
places, whether the food is edible or not, and it is usually not.”

Bada boom! I salute you, Janice Min! And I don’t envy your
day at the office today after that crack…

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.